Social Blogging

One could say that blogging has always been social – what with comments and such. But these days, things are getting even more interesting. It started with Tumblr and has been picked up at WordPress.com. I hope we’ll see it in Posthaven too – as it develops. Curious?

Tumblr and WordPress.com both have readers built into their platform. If you are a registered user, you can follow other blogs hosted within the platform and scan the excerpts from their latest posts in an online reader. If you want to read more, just click the title and you are taken to that post at it’s home blog. In addition to leaving comments, you can also “like” the post – much like you like a photo or status update in Facebook – and even reblog it. What does reblog mean? Think of it as retweeting – only with a blog post instead of a tweet. And no 140 character limit either. I love it!

Here’s a recent post on Russ Worthington’s blog that captured my attention. I clicked the Reblog link in the WordPress ribbon at the top of the window, chose the blog where I wanted it posted, and added some comments.

This is what the reblogged post looks like on my Graveyard Rabbits blog . . .

What you don’t see in this example is my comment. It appears after the excerpt from the reblogged post.

I love this! It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved. Every re-blog expands the original post’s reach to new readers. I have already discovered several interesting bloggers with my – so far – limited experiments.

Unfortunately, at the moment this feature is only functional on WordPress.com and Tumblr. Posthaven, although operational, still has only limited features and I don’t know that this is on their todo list. I can see that a self-hosted blog platform is less suited for this kind of functionality, but I’d love to see the news reader platforms moving in to take Google Reader’s place include features like this. The irritation and inconvenience of moving to a new reading platform can be mitigated by the introduction of useful new capabilities. This would be a good one!